


The Flush

by downjune



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types
Genre: Drugged Sex, Drunk Sex, F/F, Fingerfucking, Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Tenderness, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:27:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24708328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: Grace had planned for this part, but her plan sucked.
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos
Comments: 11
Kudos: 105
Collections: The First Annual Femslash Kink Exchange 2020





	The Flush

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dire_quail](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dire_quail/gifts).



> I hope you like this, dear recipient! I was so glad to get to write these two again. <3

The Flush 

Grace had planned for this part, but her plan sucked. Hiding in the motel shower, disguising the sounds she made with the stream of cool water against her back—it was a quick and dirty way to get herself through the flush with Dani and Sarah waiting for her outside. 

The loneliness of it blindsided her.

Bracing one arm against the shower wall, she jerked herself off with practiced fingers and put herself back in the barracks, a place she’d never thought to miss. The bitten off groans of her fellow augments, the stink of old adrenalin, and the press of bodies rising and reaching for relief, for the clean flush of the reset—it filled her mind, rushing her home.

She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time to miss her friends, her brothers and sisters. Fuck, her commander.

Grace bit her lip and clenched her hand into a fist against the wall. At the thought of her commander, the flush came on quick. Her commander—so different from the girl on the other side of the hollow bathroom door—standing over her, letting her… letting Grace reach for her that last time. 

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tipped over the edge. A harsh sound of pleasure and grief escaped her throat as her thighs shook and her systems and senses reset. When the aftershocks settled, she straightened on a deep breath and turned to face the shower spray. The water smelled like minerals and it cooled her heated skin, her head finally clear after the metabolic crash. 

Exiting the bathroom dry, cleaned, and dressed, Grace found Dani seated on the bed, hands on her knees, watching Grace like she was owed an answer. Grace would have offered her one, but the complex swell of love and resentment that filled her chest rose up into her throat and kept her from speaking. She didn’t owe this Dani an explanation of her systems or their maintenance. 

“Ready to go?” Dani asked, rising to her feet. “We need to leave now if we wanna get to my uncle’s before dark.”

Grace nodded. “Yeah, let’s hit the road.” She turned to leave and felt Dani hurry to her side. In her periphery, Dani looked up at her, but when Grace opened the motel door, checked to see Sarah standing by the car, then motioned Dani to go through first, she couldn’t bring herself to meet Dani’s eyes.

*

_”Grace. My quarters.” Grace turns sharply at her commander’s voice._

_It’s the last conditioning exercise before her jump. The last stress test of her enhancements, the last cocktail to flush her systems. Her fellow augments leave her alone with their commander, and a thrill of anticipation fuels the chemical rush already pumping through her body._

_“Yes, sir.” She almost trips in her eagerness to follow, limbs clumsy, head light._

_No sooner has Dani’s door shut behind them—the luxury of privacy in this moment makes Grace the richest of all the augments—than her commander presses her against it, stands toe-to-toe with her, and looks up at her with dark, furious eyes._

_Grace knows why she’s angry, but the flush always fucks with her emotions, and the fragility of this moment, just before her jump back to 2022, threatens to break her._

_“Please don’t be angry with me,” she murmurs._

_Dani’s hard expression cracks. “How can I be angry with you? How can I ever be angry with you?” She reaches up onto her toes, and Grace ducks to meet her, instinct driving her to a presumption she never would have made before this._

_Their mouths crash together when Dani grabs her by the back of the neck, and Grace lights up, her body singing with the drugs to right her systems from the crash. The flush is something she shares with her brothers and sisters who volunteered. It’s something private. It’s theirs and theirs alone—a happy accident of chemistry that the Resistance has left them to keep._

_But Grace is leaving, and if her commander wants to share this, Grace will never say no._

_“Let me see you,” Dani murmurs. Her fingers drop to the buckle of Grace’s belt. “Please, I can’t let you go without—fuck,” she spits and looks away._

_Grace nods quickly. “Yes. Whatever you want.” She shrugs out of her tank top, exhaling sharply as Dani roughly unbuckles and unbuttons her fatigues. They slide down the straight lines of her hips, and Dani grabs at her underwear too. She puts her hand between Grace’s legs, cups her there, and without ceremony slips her middle two fingers into the slick heat of her cunt. Not that she’s ever expected ceremony._

_Grace moans and bucks helplessly against her hand. Dani won’t look at her. She tips her brow against Grace’s collar bone and breathes harshly, speaking quietly in Spanish, maybe pretending Grace doesn’t understand her._

_“I can’t believe this is happening again. I can’t let you do this. How am I supposed to let you do this?”_

_The turmoil of Grace’s emotions have her pleasure on a hair-trigger, and with Dani’s fingers inside her, the heel of her palm rubbing just where she needs—just the fact of Dani here in the intimacy of this moment—has her right on the edge. The flush is brief and so sweet, she can’t bear it ending too quickly._

_Letting her wobbly legs give underneath her, Grace sinks to her knees and just manages not to cry out at the empty feeling when Dani’s hand slips free._

_“What—”_

_“You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this,” she says, tugging open Dani’s pants and dragging them over the perfect swell of her hips. Looking up the length of her commander’s compact body, she slides her arm around her legs and buries her face in the dark curls between her legs._

_“Shit.” Dani braces one hand on Grace’s shoulder and the other against the door, and they’re so close Grace can feel every tremor in her muscles as she licks into her. She goes for it, diving as deep as she can get and licking up to Dani’s clit and back, getting a good rhythm going so that Dani groans with it, rocking her hips._

_Dani’s hand shifts from Grace’s shoulder to her hair, digs in sharply and pushes her back. “Oh god, I don’t wanna come yet,” she says under her breath, but Grace grabs her hips in tighter and laps at her anyway. She shudders and curses and shoves her knee into Grace’s shoulder, like she can’t decide whether to push her away or climb onto her._

_On fire, Grace holds her tight enough that there is no way for Dani to escape and groans as Dani gives in, leaning heavily against the door and Grace’s shoulder, both. She shakes apart in Grace’s arms—or she would, but Grace grips her legs and holds her through it. She’s so close, herself, she thinks the flush could take her if she thought about it, if she let it._

_When Dani goes limp above her and tilts her hips away from Grace’s mouth, she finally lets go, lets her head roll gently against the door as she looks up._

_“Touch yourself,” Dani says, and the red staining her cheeks beneath her brown skin tells Grace she’s flustered. She bites her bottom lip so that it disappears into her mouth and rakes a hand back through her short hair. Her fingers are trembling._

_Grace nods and spreads her knees wider on the floor._

_“Look at me,” Dani tells her._

_She nods again, slips her hand into the underwear that have ridden back up her thighs. She’s dripping wet, and the sound that falls from her mouth when she touches her cunt jolts Dani like a shock. She makes a noise in answer, seemingly by reflex, but holds herself up and apart, one arm braced over Grace’s head against the door._

_“Come on,” Dani says._

_“Now?”_

_“Yeah.” She nods, eyes greedily roving over Grace’s body as she rocks onto her fingers. Grace meets her commander’s gaze and holds it as she thumbs at her clit and finally allows the flush to take her. She keeps one hand fisted in Dani’s pantleg and hunches forward with the strength of the contractions resetting and calibrating her systems. She convulses there on the floor, and it’s more intense than she’s ever felt, but she won’t look away. She tries not to even blink, drawing this moment deep into her sense memory._

*

“What’s going on with you, huh?”

Grace shot Dani a quick look and went back to packing up Karl’s armory. “What do you mean?”

Dani shifted closer. “You seem… stressed out. More than usual.”

Exhaling a short laugh, Grace slung the strap of a gun case over her shoulder and grabbed a few boxes of ammo to take out to the van. “I’ve got plenty to be stressed about. And I don’t owe you an explanation.” Grace should have been glad Dani was sticking so close to her to notice anything was off at all. She was listening, staying safe. But that bitter resentment rushed up anyway.

Dani stopped her with a hand on her forearm, and Grace looked down at the warm brown of her fingers against her synthetic flesh. Dani was so small. Somehow the force of her commander’s personality had always masked that. 

“If you want to keep me alive through this, I think you do.”

Grace looked from Dani’s hand to the stern expression in her eyes and nearly smiled. Not so different, then, these two women. 

Still, she hesitated. Then, glancing at the door of the bunker to see if Sarah or Karl were about to come stomping back in, she said, “Fine. What’s going on with me is that since I got my last dose of meds, I haven’t had the chance to fully flush my systems. It’s not a big deal—it just puts me a little on edge.”

“What do you need to do to flush your systems?” Dani asked, brows dipping. “Is it bad? Are you hurting?” Her gaze dropped to run the length of Grace’s body, and against all reason, Grace felt it start—that rush of head-clearing heat. 

“No, it’s—it’s not like that. I just…” She flailed around for a few precious moments, while Dani’s worry visibly grew on her face. All she would’ve had to say was, _“I just need a few minutes to myself before we leave.”_ Easy and simple. But this was Dani looking at her with a face twenty years younger. And Grace might be able to rip a car door off it’s hinges right now, but she was also just compromised enough, by this woman specifically, that instead she blurted, “I just usually, after my meds—I have to get off.”

Dani frowned. “Get off what?”

“Oh my god, nothing, never mind.” Grace exhaled a sharp sound and tried to pull away.

“No, wait—do you mean, like… Get off?” Dani made a face which somehow communicated that she understood exactly what Grace meant.

“Yeah.” She wasn’t embarrassed. She was _not_ embarrassed. Augments were designed to kill the machines or die trying. That they were also accidentally built for this was something she would protect until her last breath. “It doesn’t affect my strength or speed or anything.”

“What about your focus?”

“Of course not. If anything, I’m more alert.”

“You’re just…horny.” Dani’s mouth twitched. 

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.” She was still almost-smiling, though. “After all the shit that’s happened to me, I think it’s kind of amazing you’re supposed to have sex after you do a bunch of crazy superhero stuff.”

“It’s not really sex,” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice. “And it’s not any of your business.”

Her smile disappeared. “You’re right. Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. Thank you for telling me.” She shifted her weight and shot Grace a look through her eyelashes. 

“Of course,” Grace managed unsteadily. Her commander had never looked at her that way, not even at the very end. “I’m not ashamed or embarrassed, or anything, I just—wasn’t going to tell you.”

“I get it,” Dani said quickly. “I just, um. I wish I could help. If you wanted help.”

Grace’s throat went dry, and everything she’d said about heightened focus felt like a big fat lie, which it hadn’t been until right then. Very carefully, she put down the boxes of ammunition and the rifle case. “Tell Sarah I’ll just be a minute.”

She could have told Sarah herself—she passed her on the way back into the cabin—but she strode by her and up the porch steps, not trusting herself to speak, not sure she would have been able to. All the tension of their escape from the border detention facility coiled with Dani’s voice in her mind. _I wish I could help. If you wanted help._

Grace slammed into the upstairs bathroom. Even though Alicia had cleared her things out, the smell of flowery soaps and hair products lingered. Grace felt like a giant with the roof of the cabin sloping close to her head, her big hand spread wide on the vanity counter as she shoved the other one inside her jeans. 

She imagined Dani seated in front of her, knees gripping her thighs, hands on Grace’s ribs, and had to duck her head to avoid the truth of her own reflection.

*

She’d expected Dani’s tears to be the very last thing she saw, but the gentle rocking of a vehicle awoke her, and they were the first thing she saw, too, streaking through the dirt on her face. 

“Hi,” she said, touching Grace’s cheek. 

“How am I here?” Grace asked, throat dry as dust. 

Before Dani could answer, Sarah said from the front seat, “We gave you a jump. It was her idea.”

Grace blinked a few times and caught Sarah glancing at them in the rearview mirror before she looked back up at Dani. Her head pillowed on Dani’s thighs, Grace shifted her shoulders. “What?” Her legs were bent awkwardly in the footwell, so she carefully drew them up onto the backseat.

Dani shrugged. “I worked in a car factory since I was sixteen.”

“And you’ve got an auxiliary power supply,” Sarah added. “I know a guy who’s gonna take a look at your original reactor. We’ll see what he can tell us about a replacement.” She gestured to the front seat with her chin. Was it just sitting there for anyone to see? 

“The tech doesn’t exist yet,” Grace croaked.

“Well, you’re runnin’ on the juice of an early 2000s Subaru right now, so don’t be a snob.”

Dani hiccupped a laugh, smoothing the hair back from Grace’s forehead. 

She was cold. Cold and tired and alive for the moment. “It’s dangerous dragging me around like this,” she murmured. “I’m a liability now.”

“That’s what I said.” Sarah looked at them in the mirror again. 

Dani’s expression flickered with annoyance, but she didn’t address Sarah. “I wasn’t leaving you behind. Not when I was sure I could help you.”

Grace covered Dani’s hand with her own where it rested low on her ribs, above the wound she could feel dragging on her but couldn’t bring herself to investigate. “Thank you.”

“We got you some more of your meds too, just in case,” she said, flushing a little.

Grace smiled faintly. “I’m not sure I’ll need those anymore.”

Dani didn’t quite look at her when she spoke. “Well, whether you do or not, I’m here to help you.” 

Grace squeezed her hand, barely able to grip it. “I’m glad.”

*

She didn’t need them anymore. Not running on auxiliary power alone. It was just enough juice to power her enhanced skeleton and senses, but no more super speed, strength, or stamina. Her reactor had fried the Rev-9 and Karl, but it was fried too. 

That didn’t stop Dani and Sarah from hunting down leads on who could fix it or duplicate it. Grace, for her part, slept through most of those first two weeks, wrapped in blankets even in the desert heat.

When her abdomen had knit itself back together, Dani celebrated with a bottle of what she assured Grace was “decent” tequila, though Grace wouldn’t have known either way. They drank most of it behind Sarah’s Las Cruces hidey hole. The distinction between “cabin” and “shack” didn’t overly concern any of them, but Sarah said it was a cabin. Grace would’ve called it a shack, but she didn’t have the energy to argue. 

The tequila was better than anything she’d choked down twenty years from now, so she let it warm her underpowered body, along with the small fire Sarah had started in the pit out back and the press of Dani’s body alongside hers as the night turned the air chilly.

They stayed out after Sarah grumbled something about “crazy kids” and shuffled off to bed. Sensation prickled along Grace’s skin when Dani nudged her knee in tighter alongside hers, and she twitched a shiver.

“Are you cold?” Dani asked, leaning away to look at her in the flickering glow of the fire.

Grace shook her head. “I’m fine. As long as you stay close to me.” 

The words just slid out of her, but before they could embarrass her, Dani smiled, pleased, and tucked herself even closer against Grace’s side. Which was when it occurred to Grace, “You know, I don’t need to be drunk or high on my meds for us to do this. You don’t need to get me fucked up.”

Though, she’d never have said those things sober, so she might have just made herself a liar. And Dani’s eyes had gotten big. “That’s not what I—I didn’t—”

“I do have a sex drive.”

“I just wanted to celebrate you feeling better. That’s all, I swear.” Dani leaned back on the bench seat ripped out of some old truck cab, one hand lifted. The other rested just by Grace’s thigh.

“Oh.” She looked at Dani, confusion dawning. “Are you sure? Why did I think you’ve been coming onto me?” She shook her head. “I think I forgot what it’s like to have a normal metabolism. I’m a little drunk.”

“Because I was,” Dani blurted. “I wanted to help you, you know, before. Am I pressuring you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“No, please pressure me.” She grabbed Dani’s hand where it rested by her thigh. “I’d like that, I think.” A little different than her commander snapping out orders and expecting everyone to follow them. She wanted to live in that difference right now.

Dani hesitated, then placed her other hand on Grace’s side, her thumb just brushing Grace’s breast. “All right then, why don’t you kiss me?”

Grace nodded. “All right.” And leaned in.  
*

The truth of her chemistry and physiology was, of course, more complicated. Once she’d volunteered for the augmentations, Grace’s world had narrowed to her fellow augments and their mission. Whatever impulse she might’ve had to connect with someone outside the mission had been eaten by the demands of the program and by the terrifying changes of her own body.

She didn’t know quite what to do now with her desire. Not when her commander had always been utterly off-limits. 

This wasn’t the easy instinct of the flush, the itch that needed just the right touch to scratch. 

Dani filled her lap and all of her senses. She traced her hands up and down Grace’s ribs with gentle touches that whispered like breath against her skin. She followed the scars on Grace’s throat with her tongue and spoke quietly in Spanish, just as her commander had before Grace’s jump, but not like that at all. 

“You’re so beautiful, I can hardly look at you sometimes. I think my heart will explode. I don’t know what to do with all this. I don’t know what to do.”

Grace brushed the hair back from Dani’s face, kissed her, and didn’t answer, not knowing if Dani wanted her to understand, not knowing what she would have said anyway. She slid her hand between them and pressed it to the heated join of Dani’s legs. 

“Yes,” Dani exhaled sharply and rocked forward into her grip. Dani’s fingers interlaced with hers, to press them more firmly against her, then to unbutton the fly of her jeans and guide her inside. At the damp heat of her, Grace swallowed a groan and rocked up to meet her, using the shape of her hand between them to give her the friction she needed. 

The dying fire kept Dani’s face in shadow, but she found Dani’s mouth easily. They moved together on the dusty, old seat behind Sarah’s shack with only the sounds of the desert for company, and Grace couldn’t compare it to anything, not even what she’d done with this woman, twenty years from now in a future that hopefully didn’t exist anymore.

Her climax crested slowly, with each lift of her hips, and unlike the flush, it didn’t set her to rights at all. She smothered her cry against Dani’s shoulder and felt entirely taken apart—and worse, as Dani arched her spine and did nothing to mask the sound of her pleasure. She writhed in Grace’s lap and tipped her head back, baring the curve of her throat. Grace could have blinked on her night vision to see every detail in harsh photo-negative, but she let Dani’s orgasm wash organically over her. The clench of her body set Grace’s heart pounding so hard, she got lightheaded. And maybe it was the tequila, or maybe she just couldn’t handle this much intense emotion without her full power, but right then, she held on for dear life because it felt like she had to.

When Dani went limp against her front, breath hot on her throat, Grace propped herself up with her arm braced on the bench seat and pressed her cheek to Dani’s. 

Promises threatened to spill from her lips—promises of protection and loyalty—ones she could in no way guarantee in her weakened state. She wanted to say them anyway.

“Dani, I…”

“I’m gonna look out for you,” she murmured against Grace’s throat. “You protected me, now I’m gonna do the same for you.”

Grace drew in a deep breath and wrapped her arms tightly around Dani’s middle. She couldn’t stop Dani from making promises. She didn’t want to. 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr!](https://itstartledme.tumblr.com/)


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